Wednesday, June 10, 2015

This is just vile

UPDATE: Diane Rehm has apologized.

You can judge for yourself if it is adequate. Personally, I feel that she's letting herself off pretty easy, given that her question was the equivalent to asking if it's true that Jews use the blood of gentile babies to make matzohs.

Or I should say, incompetent, sloppy journalism repeating a vile lie.



I like the Diane Rehm Show. She has good guests and she is generally a good, well-informed interviewer, but today she went way out of bounds.

I didn't hear the show myself, but Talking Points Memo reports that in the middle of her interview of Bernie Sanders she asked him this:

"Senator, you have dual citizenship with Israel," Rehm said during the interview on her nationally broadcast show based on station WAMU.

. . .

Rehm cited "a list we have gotten" at NPR that said Sanders was "on that list."

Sanders dismissed it as "nonsense that goes on in the Internet."

(Rehm's station WAMU did not immediately return TPM's request for comment on Wednesday.)

"Are there members of Congress who do have dual citizenship or is that part of the fable?" Rehm asked Sanders.

It's true, there is a list on the Internet of members of Congress with dual citizenship. As you might expect, it is a vile, anti-Semitic lie. If you find it, and it's easy to find, it's on an anti-Semitic site. It repeats the canard that American Jews are not really Americans, and their loyalty cannot be trusted because their true allegiance is to Israel. Kind of funny that even though the media love to trace the genealogy that connects any particular president to the English royal family we never heard claims that George Bush or Ronald Reagan had dual citizenship with England, did we? No, it's always Israel and it's pretty much always Democrats.

When Bernie first announced I got on one of the very first Sanders for President Facebook pages and I soon left after I realized that a high percentage, maybe half, of the posts there were claims that he is a dual citizen.

This is just intolerable. As many awards as Diane Rehm has, she has to know better than to regurgitate this kind of anti-Semitic garbage. I haven't seen a retraction on her page yet, so when I'm done with this I'm going over to lodge a complaint. I hope you will, too.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, if you hear someone complaining about how the Rothschilds are running the world, that person's an anti-Semite, too.


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